Motherboard My friend gave me an Emachines t2885, i want ot change the motherboard; does it matter which one I get, i kinda am making a enw computer putting new and old pieces together. Also, when I change the motherboard, and eveything else, what comes up on screen and how do i install a windows. Thank you

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If his hard drive responds in safe mode then the bios is detecting his hard drive right and nothing you can do will make it any different. It doesn't matter what the bios is set like on his computer and how it installed.

The problem is you have two different machines. When windows installed on his computer it detected his motherboard chipset, the motherboard add on, the ide and psi ports and installed the drivers for his board. Now you're installing it on your computer with a different motherboard, different chipset, ports etc.. Windows doesn't autodetect and install motherboard drivers like it does other peripherls. Unless the motherboards are amost identical, when you put a hard drive with Windows installed on another system into a different system Windows will 99% of the time fail to run. Most the time you'll get a blue screen of death with a driver name on it that failed. You can configure that drive as a slave and put both drives in and boot off yours and see his.

Pull out the cmos battery on the motherboard. Most look like shiny nickles, be carefull not to damage the board. Make sure you unplug the computer first and let it sit a minute or two afterwards before putting it back.

That will set the bios back to defaults and you should be able to get the computer up and running from there.

As far as slaving that drive to be used as extra storage, you might want to consider an external enclousure instead.

gtater,It's ironic that you ask me this question today-- i am just now carrying in another eMachine computer to fix. Anyway, unfortunately I do not have one that is the same model as yours (T2742). However, I did some quick research and found that yours has the same exact motherboard as the T2898 which I made the diagram for!

For further reference, I would like to share this diagram for the eMachines T6544 in case someone else may need this model. This is the computer I just carried in... might as well share.By the way, the power switch doesn't need to be oriented any particular way (positive and negative), which is why the switches are not labeled as + or -. Switches can be wired either way and they will work the same.